Wi-Fi

An Update on Some Recent Posts

I wanted to take the opportunity to update you on a couple of my more recent blog posts.

First, as you may recall, I tried disabling virtual memory on my Data Protection Manager server in an effort to eliminate paging and the problems with inconsistent replicas that paging seems to cause. Since that time, all of the replicas of my protected volumes have remained in a consistent state.  The replicas for my Exchange storage groups became inconsistent after about a day, and my system state replicas became inconsistent about a day or two later.

Although I use multiple methods to back up my network, I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. I ended up replacing the system board in my DPM server tonight, and upgraded from 2 GB of RAM to 4 GB. I will keep you posted on what happens.

The other issue that I wanted to talk about was the problems that I am having with Windows 7 and the wireless NIC that’s built into my lab laptop. After doing some more research, I have discovered that the issue may be hardware related. I found a technical article that said that there is a bug in my laptop’s firmware and that because of the bug, you have to flash the BIOS before you will be able to install Windows Vista SP2. According to the article, the bug was directly related to the wireless NIC.

I went ahead and flashed the BIOS, and for kicks I installed Windows Vista with SP2. Unfortunately, I am now having the same issue with Vista that I was having with Windows 7. One thing that may possibly be causing the problem though is buggy drivers. I’m not positive, but I may have been running the 32-bit version of Vista when everything was working correctly. I was using the 64-bit version of Windows 7, and am currently using the 64-bit version of Vista. Unfortunately, I am going to need the machine for a project that I am working on for the next two months, so it will be August before I will be able to blow Windows off of the machine and test my theory.

Until then, I want to say thank you to Glen at Microsoft for his helpful suggestions.

Windows 7 Wireless Networking

Lately I have been doing a lot of work with the Windows 7 Release Candidate. One strange issue that I keep running into is that I keep losing my wireless networking connection.

I have been using an HP laptop with 4 GB of RAM to evaluate Windows 7. For some reason, my wireless network connection will drop for no apparent reason. If I wait for half an hour or so, the connection will come back, but in fifteen minutes or so it will drop again. during periods of inavailability, the machine seems to be able to see my access point, but it cannot communicate with it no matter what I have tried.

I suspected that a hardware failure might be to blame, so I blew out Windows 7 and installed Vista on the machine, but the problem went away when I did. I put Windows 7 back, and my connectivity issues returned with it.

The problem does not seem to affect wired network connections as far as I can tell. I was just curious as to whether or not anyone else has run into this issue.

Windows 7 Wireless Networking

I just installed the Windows 7 release candidate for the third time. For some reason this hadn’t registered with me until now, but the installer is actually designed to detect any wireless networks that happen to be in range. You can set up wireless networking as a part of the initial installation process. I absolutely love this feature, because it means that when Setup is complete, you are already connected to the network and are ready to go.

I haven’t seen tha automated installation kit for Windows 7 yet (if there is one), but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you could specify a wireless network and an encryption key within the installation parameters.